This invention relates to barbecue accessories and more particularly to barbecue accessories that can be used in connection with baking pizzas on a barbecue.
Pizzas are an increasingly popular food item and to fulfill the consumer's desire to make pizzas at home, specialized barbecue products have been designed to allow consumers to make pizzas at home. Such products include dedicated portable pizza ovens and conversion kits that convert a backyard barbecue grill into a pizza oven as disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. U.S. 2011/0214662 by Alfred Contarino, Jr. Contarino discloses an insert for a kettle style barbecue grill which is set on top of the bottom bowl of the barbecue grill for creating a baking chamber, which is accessible through a side opening between the barbecue grill bowl and the grill cover.
A drawback of such inserts is that, whereas kettle-style barbecue grills come in different standard diameters, each insert has a fixed diameter so that it can be used with only one size barbecue grill. Another drawback concerns the volume of the baking chamber above the surface on which the pizza is placed. The insert adds considerable volume to the baking chamber because it must be of a sufficient height to create a large enough access opening to comfortably insert a pizza. The added volume makes it more difficult to bring the temperature up in the baking chamber sufficiently to bake the pizza evenly on both sides. Compounding the problem is the heat that is lost through the access opening in the insert.
The present invention provides a pizza oven conversion apparatus that can be used with different sized barbecue grills, that decreases the volume added to the baking chamber, and that helps correct for the imbalance of heat in the baking chamber created by the access opening in the insert.